My apologies to our cyberfriend up north for the title.

After the previous post, you might be wondering what the hell kind of cult the Solar Lodge of the OTO might have been. Perhaps you might think, “Well, it’s the ‘60s, and everyone was into a lot of weird stuff back then. Then too, you’re talking about California, right?”

The roots of the Solar Lodge actually begin centuries before the 1960s. But for the purposes of this story, we need only go back as far as 1942, the year that famed mystic Aleister Crowley, then the international chief of the Ordo Templis Orientis, appointed a guy named Jack Parsons to head the Agape Lodge in California.

Parsons wasn’t your everyday mystic. A respected scientist doing research out of the California Institute of Technology, he co-founded NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories. If you check out NASA’s official website, and do a search of his name, you’ll find pages of documents devoted to him, as well it should. After all, Wernher von Braun cited him as the true father of the American space program. While NASA briefly acknowledges Parsons’ role in the occult, they tend to downplay the importance of it in his life.

Parsons’ work in esoterica would prove every bit as influential as his scientific research. Like his mentor Crowley, Parsons could very well be taken for a Satanist, especially when quoted contrary to context. In his 1949 “The Manifesto of the Antichrist,” for example, he wrote:

I shall bring all men to the Law of the BEAST 666, and in His Law I shall conquer the world. And within seven years of this time, BABALON, THE SCARLET WOMAN HILARION will manifest among ye, and bring this my work to its fruition. An end to conscription, compulsion, regimentation, and the tyranny of false laws.

"Manifesto" itself was not so much a pledge to serve the devil so much as it is an indictment against the hypocrisy of the Christian church. In other words, Parsons is charging Christian belief with the crime of imperialism at the expense of personal liberty, and of forcing enslavement to all of those not powerful enough within society to resist. So, as he figured it, if he had to be the Antichrist to correct the evils of the church, he would. In other writings, he listed those evils as class brutality, war, racism and the condemnation of sexuality.

As controversial or provocative as you might find Parsons and his beliefs, some of his cohorts seemed even more questionable. Wilfred Smith, the former leader of the Agape Lodge, for example, ran off with Jack’s first wife, Helen. Crowley wound up firing Smith to install Parsons.

Parsons then teamed up with another esoteric, Lafayette Ron Hubbard, who joined the lodge in 1945. Crowley, however, didn’t trust L. Ron one bit. Hubbard’s checkered career as a naval intelligence officer led Aleister to regard him as unscrupulous. Nevertheless, Jack teamed up with Hubbard and someone else involved with naval intelligence, future Mrs. Parsons Marjorie Cameron, to perform a grand piece of sex magick known as the Babalon Working (BW). Drawn from the Enochian system of Elizabethan mystics Dr. John Dee and Sir Edward Kelly, the BW required the participants to invoke the spirit of Hilarion in order for her to enter into the body of a nubile young woman (Cameron). Parsons would subsequently (so to speak) screw the hell out of her, while Hubbard took notes. The point was to conceive a moonchild. As Crowley explained:

The Aeon of Horus is of the nature of a child. To perceive this, we must conceive of the nature of a child without the veil of sentimentality - beyond good and evil, perfectly gentle, perfectly ruthless, containing all possibilities within the limits of heredity, and highly susceptible to training and environment. But the nature of Horus is also the nature of force - blind, terrible, unlimited force.

By 1949, two years after Crowley’s death, the Agape Lodge stopped holding regular meetings and began to splinter. Whatever tricks he had in store to bolster enthusiasm, Parsons magick came to a screeching halt in the summer of 1952, when he blew himself up in his own laboratory. After Parson’s death, leadership of the Agape Lodge fell into the hands of Ray and Mildred Burlingame. Yet the exact relation of that, and other estranged lodges to the OTO, didn’t seem very clear. In 1946, Crowley had apparently given authority to Grady McMurtry to take over all of the lodges in case of an emergency. This didn’t take any power away from the Burlingames, however, and sometime in the 1950s, Mildred, on her own authority, initiated one Georgina Brayton into the ranks of the OTO.

Marjorie would later gain her own bit of renown as an artist and an actress, making her screen debut in the 1954 movie Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, a flick directed by Kenneth Anger. Anger himself belonged, at the time, to the Order of the Trapezoid, a group founded in 1950 by Anton LaVey that eventually evolved into the Church of Satan. L. Ron Hubbard, as you most likely know, went on to found the Church of Scientology.

I wonder if Parsons, Cameron, Hubbard or the Burlingames could have imagined that a little boy named Anthony Gibbons would someday be caged and tortured in the name of their legacy. I wonder if they could see the connection that would eventually link their Solar Lodge with the Church of Satan, Scientology and certain events occurring during the summer of 1969.

Researchers would also connect another group, fairly or unfairly, to the story, and their presence in here should give everyone sufficient pause to think that there’s more to this familiar narrative than meets the eye.